Lawrence Kudlow Quotes

You think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard and toiled away creating Microsoft if he thought the government was going to take most of the company? Or Steve Jobs - drop out of Stanford to create Apple?

The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

I have tremendous admiration for companies with the kind of pioneering spirit and innovation eBay has demonstrated from day one.

The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.

I'm inspired by Walt Disney. I'm inspired by Howard Hughes. I'm inspired by Henry Ford. I'm inspired by Steve Jobs. I mean, I'm inspired by James Perse.

The fact that my father set out on his own to build Hyatt - a business the family was not in and a business he was learning about as he was building it - is instructive.

In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

That's one of the things I love about entrepreneurship is that if you see something that you don't like - and if you think you have a better idea - you can pursue your model.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

The entrepreneurial instinct is in you. You can't learn it, you can't buy it, you can't put it in a bottle. It's just there and it comes out.

For most of our history, no one dared to tell Americans, 'you don't build that.'

From computers to information technology to airplanes, it has been America's unique blend of republican government and free-market capitalism that has allowed us to surpass all other nations in history.

I'm not afraid to take chances or go off on my own.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

The heart of the entrepreneur can beat freely in anyone.

I just know that it's smart for my career to carve my own path and do my own thing.

Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names.

I liken myself to Henry Ford and the auto industry, I give you 90 percent of what most people need.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.